


Rebalance

by rhysiana



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Acupuncturist Stiles, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Anger is a Terrible Anchor, Derek's Wolf is a Secret Romantic, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Peter Gives The Worst Advice, Tattooed Stiles Stilinski, Wolf Derek, stereksummerexchange17
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-01
Updated: 2017-07-01
Packaged: 2018-11-21 23:53:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11368263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhysiana/pseuds/rhysiana
Summary: When Derek loses his powers while saving Cora's life, he gets sent to Stiles Stilinski, acupuncturist to the supernatural set, to try to fix him. He sincerely doubts it will work, but he's run out of options.





	Rebalance

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Sterek Summer Exchange 2017 for hoechlin-perfection, who gave me the AU prompts "tattoos/mystical tattoos, emissary!Stiles," and I had an acupuncture appointment the same day I got the assignment, so this was the result. (I'd already had the idea of Stiles running a magical acupuncturist clinic with Lydia as the attached compounding pharmacist for a post-canon story, but since that's a sprawling epic thing that I have no idea if I'll ever write, I repurposed it here.) I hope you like it!

Stiles leaned against the front counter and ran a finger down the handwritten column of the appointment book. Danny had scoffed at it the last time he’d blown through town, but Stiles had yet to figure out how to put a privacy spell on computerized records, and Danny himself was the entire reason Stiles didn’t want to put sensitive supernatural medical records in any kind of internet-accessible database.

Danny had just smiled lazily at that. “Fair. Can I still get a tune up for free?”

Stiles had rolled his eyes. “Acupuncture is _not_ the same as getting your tires rotated, Danny.” But he’d done it anyway, because Danny was an old friend, and he could renew the protection charms he’d laid on him years ago, when it became clear Danny wasn’t going to ignore the supernatural and therefore it was unlikely to ignore him. And then he’d made Danny update the security on all the clinic computers anyway. Danny’d then breezed back out with a kiss on Stiles’ cheek, a bro-y slap on the ass, and an admonishment to give him a call the next time he had a conference in Hawaii.

Stiles sighed. That slap on the ass was the most action Stiles had gotten in months.

He looked back at the appointment book and sighed again. He never had time to date anyway. “Lydia, why is my calendar so goddamned full?”

There was the sound of chair casters coasting across the floor and then Lydia caught herself on the doorframe as she leaned back out of her herb room. “Because we’re just that good? Are you really going to complain about being the victim of your own success? People know about us now, Stiles. This is a good thing.”

“Yeah, but so is getting to eat lunch.”

She waved a dismissive hand. “I put a salad in the fridge for you. Besides,” she said, finally getting out of her chair to come inspect the appointment book beside him, “I could swear you had a break in there today.”

“I _did_.” He tapped the spot formerly known as “lunch” pointedly, where there was definitely a name written now, and definitely not in his handwriting.

“Oh, that. Yes.”

“It’s a new client appointment, too! You know those always take longer.”

Her teasing attitude vanished completely. “I know. But I think it’s important you take this one.”

He studied her seriously. “Is this the banshee talking?”

“N-nooooo, not exactly.” She tilted her head, a gesture he was used to whenever she tried to explain something not easily pinned down into words. “It’s a werewolf alpha. A representative of his pack got in touch with Scott, who sent them to me, and… it’s not something I’d ever heard of before.”

“What?”

“He seems to be losing his powers.”

“I… is that even possible?” Stiles asked slowly, mind already ticking through possibilities.

“I don’t know, but we should help him. I just… I know we can.” Her brow creased and her eyes started losing focus. He put on a confident grin before she could get too lost.

“We will, Lydia. You know that. We’re awesome.”

She shook herself back into the present and made a derisive noise as she spun on her heel, hating when he caught her drifting. “Of course we are,” she said haughtily over her shoulder as she disappeared back into her room. “And eat that salad while you still have a few minutes.”

“Yes, dear,” he muttered sarcastically as he made his way to the fridge. Which was, of course, why his mouth was full, complete with a stray piece of lettuce hanging out of it, when the truly unfairly attractive man walked in.

Well, was pushed in, more like. Stiles swallowed hurriedly as the man turned to glare at the woman behind him. “I know how to walk, Cora.”

“If only you could be trusted to do it, _Derek_.” She turned to Stiles, who was now trying to wipe surreptitiously at his mouth in case there was dressing. She did not look amused. “Are you the acupuncturist or whatever?”

“Uh, yeah. Yes, that’s me. Stiles. Er, Stilinski.” _Way to sound professional, man. Instill that confidence._ “I believe you spoke to my partner, Lydia?”

“Yeah. She assured me you’d be the right person for the job.” Cora looked decidedly skeptical, but gestured behind her nonetheless. “This is my idiot brother, Derek. Fix him.” And with that, she spun on her heel and left.

Derek watched her go and sighed. “Sorry. She thinks it’s her fault.”

“It?” Stiles asked, curiosity officially piqued.

“Me. Being broken.” He finally met Stiles’ gaze, and Stiles lost himself for a split second in trying to pin down their color. Then Derek blinked and glanced away, down, pained and maybe a little embarrassed. “She’s just angry that nothing has worked, but it’s fine. I’ll be fine. I… wasn’t supposed to be the alpha anyway.”

Stiles slid out from behind the desk and gestured for Derek to follow him. “Why don’t you come on back and we’ll see what we can do?”

Derek gave a resigned shrug and followed Stiles down the hallway. Stiles turned back to usher him through the door and caught Derek’s raised eyebrows as he took in the room. He paused at the threshold, eying the massage table in the center of the room askance. “I… Look, this isn’t going to work. Why don’t I just save us both some frustration and go?”

Stiles’ eyes narrowed. “Not even going to give me a shot? You wound me, dude.”

“This all just looks a bit… New Age.”

Stiles stared at him for a few seconds to see if he’d heard the words that had come out of his own mouth. “You’re a _werewolf_ , and you’re telling me that the world’s blandest acupuncture room is too New Age-y for you. What on earth kind of emissaries have you been to before?”

Derek looked away again. “A veterinarian,” he muttered.

“Well, just think of this as my exam table and hop on up, Fido,” Stiles said, patting the apparently offensively padded table as pointedly as possible.

Derek glared and crossed his arms.

Stiles rolled his eyes and went to get his clipboard from the chair in the corner.

“So if I don’t believe this is going to work, it won’t, right?” Derek asked.

“You’re one of those ‘acupuncture is all psychosomatic’ people, huh?”

Derek shrugged again.

“And a man of many words, I see,” Stiles murmured, filling in a few of the basic blanks of his intake form. “Doesn’t matter,” he said as he looked up. “One, acupuncture works, and I should know, because I can _see_ it, but also, two, I’m _magic_.” He let a spark run over his fingers in illustration. “That’s kind of the reason you’re here, after all.”

Derek uncrossed his arms and reluctantly pulled himself up to sit on the table. “Fine,” he said, still clearly uncomfortable. “But I’m not getting naked.”

“Did I ask?” Stiles discarded the clipboard and stepped forward, reaching for Derek’s arm. “I just need to take your pulses.”

“Pulses?”

“There’s two on each side,” Stiles explained absently, fingers pressed to Derek’s wrist and one eye on his watch.

Derek was quiet for a few seconds, then asked, “So what do I call you?”

“Hmmm?”

“Dr. Stilinski?”

“I mean, you can if you want, it’s not really a title acupuncturists typically use, but in my case it’s not inaccurate.”

Derek’s brow furrowed as he worked his way through that statement, and Stiles repositioned his fingers to get a feel for Derek’s liver pulse. “So what was the doctorate in, then?”

Stiles shot him a brief smile for having gotten it, but looked away again before he could get distracted and lose count. “Electromagnetic theory.”

Derek started in surprise and Stiles bit back a grin as he calmly switch to Derek’s other wrist.

“Show me your eyes.”

Derek just blinked.

“Your other eyes,” Stiles clarified.

“Oh.” Derek swallowed, blinked again, and then his eyes flared red… for just a moment, before flickering between yellow and blue and then returning to his impossible to pin down human starburst of hazel.

It was Stiles’ turn to blink. “Huh. Well, that’s a thing. Let me see your shift.”

“I… I can’t.”

“Hmm. Stick out your tongue.”

Derek looked vaguely taken aback, but did so.

“Okay, you’re not any kind of physically sick, which seemed doubtful, but I had to rule it out first. What color were your eyes before you became an alpha?”

Derek looked uncomfortable again. “Blue.”

Stiles just nodded, expression free of judgment as he leaned back against the arm of his chair, and Derek’s shoulders lost a little tension. “So why don’t you tell me what’s been happening to you?”

“I don’t… I don’t have a very large pack,” Derek started, staring straight ahead at the wall. “It’s just me, my sister, and three others I bit in.” He paused, seeming unsure of where to go next.

“You and Cora are born wolves?” Stiles asked softly. Derek nodded. “And there used to be more of you?” Derek nodded again.

“Our family,” he stopped, then started again, “Our family was targeted by hunters, and now Cora and I are the only ones left. Well, and our uncle Peter.” He made a dismissive hand gesture at the name. “The hunters found us again a few months ago. Cora ended up with wolfsbane poisoning, the worst I’ve ever seen. And then Peter said I could use the alpha spark to save her, to take her pain and then more. So I did.” He shrugged. “It worked.”

“But?”

“But I think Peter thought the alpha spark would jump to him as the next most fit Hale. When it didn’t, he disappeared. We haven’t seen him since.”

“And what happened to you after that?”

“It took a few days for me to recover, but Cora was fine, so I didn’t really think anything of it. My eyes stayed blue for about a week, then the red started to come back, so we all just assumed it was a recovery thing, too.”

“But it wasn’t,” Stiles said, not really a question, as he let his vision do that sideways slip that allowed him to see magic.

Derek shook his head. “At first it was. But then my power started to…” he gestured vaguely, helplessly, “flicker. I lost my alpha shift, then the full beta shift. Sense of smell fell off. Claws only came sometimes. And then I stopped healing.” His shoulders slumped and he just sat there on the table, hunched, staring at the floor, hands clasped loosely between his thighs.

Stiles cocked his head to the side, fascinated. He knew Derek had stopped talking and he should really say something to reassure him, the guy having just basically laid himself bare, but Stiles had never seen anyone’s power flare and pulse like this before.

Derek growled in frustration. “Look, just tell me there’s nothing you can do for me and I’ll leave, all right?”

“What was your anchor?” Stiles asked.

Derek snapped his head up and glared at him. “What?”

“Anchor. What was your anchor?” Because that was the weirdest thing about what he was seeing: it had no center.

“Anger.”

Stiles blinked in surprise and the corona of Derek’s power disappeared momentarily. “What? No. Why? That’s a _terrible_ idea.”

“It _was_ my pack, but I had to find a new one after they died,” Derek snapped.

“But anger is so inherently unstable! No one can sustain that as an emotional anchor long-term. Well,” he added, suddenly distracted, “maybe the Incredible Hulk.” Derek growled again and Stiles shook himself back into what passed for focus for him. “But seriously, did no one warn you?”

“No,” Derek said with a frown. “Peter was the one who suggested it.”

“Peter the one who suggested you save your sister’s life with your alpha spark and then fucked off when it didn’t pass to him? That Peter?”

Derek gave a short nod.

Stiles snorted. “Seems like a highly reliable source.”

Derek seemed at a loss for how to respond.

Fair. Stiles had just kind of shattered some of his illusions, after all. “I know what the problem is, though. And I can fix it.” He stood up and leveled Derek with an entirely serious look. “Will you trust me?”

***

Derek’s immediate kneejerk reaction was to say no. Why would he trust him? Whenever he looked back at his life, he always thought it was a wonder he could trust anybody at all, let alone this guy he’d just met. And yet… he did.

He frowned at the floor in confusion, took a deep breath, and looked back up at Stiles’ arresting amber eyes. “Yes.”

“Great!” Stiles said, smile breaking through once more, and then started rolling up his sleeves as he continued, “I assume you’ve never had acupuncture before.”

Derek just shook his head, distracted as Stiles’ sleeves began to reveal surprisingly muscular forearms, but even more than that, tattoos. His left arm appeared to be covered in an extremely intricate tree, branches fanning out around his arm and up towards the inside of his elbow, roots stretching down to encircle his wrist. As he turned his attention to his right arm, its inner surface showed what appeared to be a globe with looping lines fanning out all around it, exiting the north pole and reentering through the south. The rest of that arm was covered with what looked like… constellations, maybe? Not any Derek recognized, though. Some sort of intricate design of lines connected through nodes, in any case. The longer he stared, the more hypnotic they became.

He blinked and came back to himself when Stiles turned away to the shelves behind him. When he turned back, he had a small box of needles in hand. He held one up and slid off the protective plastic sleeve, which Derek assumed was meant to indicate it was sterile.

“It won’t hurt, I promise,” Stiles said. He gestured toward Derek’s hand. “Look, I can show you on your arm so you’ll have an idea.”

Wordlessly, Derek held out his hand and Stiles drew it forward. Maybe Stiles was still talking, but all Derek was aware of was his long, elegant fingers delicately twisting the impossibly thin needle into the meat of his forearm without him feeling a thing. He removed it a few seconds later and tossed it in the sharps bin, running a thumb over the spot where the needle had been.

“See? No big deal.”

Given that Derek’s wolf, who had been remarkably silent for months now, was actually taking notice of the proceedings, Derek really wasn’t sure that was an accurate statement, but he just nodded.

“Good! But, uh, now, if you’re staying, I do have to ask you to take off your shirt.”

And as much as Derek usually hated the way people looked at him for his body, all he felt when he caught Stiles looking quickly away as his shirt cleared his face was a smug warmth in the pit of his stomach. It felt… nice.

Stiles cleared his throat and blinked a few times, gaze going unfocused the way it had been before. His head tilted a bit to the side. “Socks and shoes, too, please. That… should be all I need, yeah. Then you can just lie down. Face up, hands by your sides.” He turned away to the shelves again and busied himself there until Derek seemed to have himself situated.

For several minutes, Stiles didn’t appear to do much that Derek could see. His hands hovered above Derek, tracing invisible paths, and his eyes focused not quite on Derek himself, always just slightly above or to the side. His brow furrowed in concentration, but Derek thought he also looked… concerned. This was the longest he’d been silent since Derek had walked in, and it was starting to seem unnerving.

“What,” Derek started, and it came out almost as a whisper. He cleared his throat and tried again. “What do you see?”

Stiles stopped and dropped his hands to the table, fingers tapping thoughtfully by Derek’s side. He raised his right arm. “Most people,” he said, gesturing at the odd globe tattoo, “are like magnets. Their energy flows in smooth arcs around them, always looping back through the center, supernatural creatures more than most.” Then he waved his hand dismissively. “And there are colors and things that I can never really explain. But you…” He tapped his lips as his eyes unfocused again, then reached out with those expressive fingers and started tracing shapes in the air. “You’re like… solar flares. Arcs at random, sometimes with an end snapping out, untethered, no center.”

Derek frowned. That didn’t sound good. But then there were cool fingertips on his forehead, just for a moment, as if Stiles was trying to smooth away the frown, though when Derek looked at him in shock, he pulled his hand away and picked up a needle.

“Let’s get to work recentering that energy, shall we?” he said brightly.

Derek resolutely turned his gaze to the ceiling and tried to relax.

***

Stiles had five years of graduate school and a dissertation worth of words on the subject, not to mention countless late-night conversations with Lydia and Kira about math and magic and electricity and physics, but he could still never really explain what he did. Not even to himself.

He rubbed the Nemeton tattoo on his left arm absently, remembering the first time he’d recognized lines of power gone wrong and felt compelled to fix them, and looked at Derek’s sleeping form on the table. (And hadn’t his falling asleep been a surprise; he never would have expected it from the tense man whose sister pushed him through the door not even an hour ago. He must have needed the rest.) Stiles suspected this was going to be another Nemeton situation, where he could just _feel_ what was wrong and was flying on instinct to fix it.

He shrugged at himself. _If it works, it works_. Already the flares were dying down, fewer in number and not nearly as violent, but the colors (did invisible things on another plane of reality really have color?) were still pulsing and flickering erratically, much like Derek’s eyes had. Now that the flares were less distracting, though, Stiles could see a dark tangle at Derek’s center, where his stabilizing anchor should have been. And while Scott and the other shifters Stiles knew all talked about their anchors as mental and emotional concepts, Stiles’ own experience had always insisted they were more concrete than that, more tangible, more embodied. He could _see_ them, after all.

So now he just had to figure out how to get Derek’s energy and his beliefs about his anchor all running in the same direction.

He sat forward in his chair, fingers twitching as he reached out with his magic to start teasing at the strands of Derek’s tangled supernatural energies. He could fix this. He knew he could.

On his arms, the leaves of the Nemeton blew gently in an unfelt breeze, the magnetic globe spun, and the lines and nodes shifted and danced, reconnecting themselves in new configurations that only Stiles’ magic understood.

***

It was the sensation of something snapping back into place, of suddenly not being underwater or packed in cotton anymore, as if he’d popped his ears and could suddenly hear again, but with his whole body, that woke Derek up with a gasp. Gentle but firm hands pressed down on his shoulders before he could try to jerk up.

“Nope, nope, stay down for just a minute, let me get all these needles out of you. They don’t feel like much of anything as long as you’re holding still, but believe me, you don’t want to try moving around much.”

 _Stiles_ , his brain supplied, reorienting him to his surroundings. _Mate_ , his wolf added. _Anchor_.

It was a good thing Derek was already lying down. _What?!_

_Steadiness. Roots. Solidity. Love._

_I most certainly am not in love with him; I just met him!_

He felt his wolf do the equivalent of an internal shrug. _Saved you. Saved us._

“Well. Seems like it worked, at least a bit,” Stiles observed dryly, and Derek realized he’d dug his claws into the padded table.

“Shit,” he hissed, pulling them back in and reveling in the feeling of having even that much control of his powers again. “Sorry.”

“Eh, whatever, this room has seen much worse. Wanna sit up for me and show me your eyes?”

Derek sat up feeling stronger than he had in months and felt himself actually smile. “I can do better than that,” he said with satisfaction, and shifted.

And then shifted some more, all the way into full wolf form. He gave an undignified scramble back into the center of the table and snorted in annoyance. When he looked up, Stiles was staring at him with wide eyes.

“Well. That’s new. Uh, could you do that before?”

Derek shook his head.

“Cool. Think you can change back?”

Derek cocked his head to the side in consideration, found the new twist his shifting seemed to take, and flipped it back.

Stiles spun around. “Whoa, naked, okay, yeah, I’ll just, uh, be right out there.” He nearly hit himself in the face with the door, trying to open it so fast.

Derek laughed as he fished his jeans back out from under the table and pulled them on.

 _Anchor_ , his wolf insisted again.

 _Yeah, maybe_ , he thought.

***

Stiles was back behind the front desk when Derek emerged, looking slightly freaked out.

“Dude! What was that?”

Derek shrugged. “Full wolf shift. My mother had it, too. Guess you fixed me even more than you thought.”

“Holy shit. I mean, good for me, but holy shit.”

Derek leaned on the edge of the counter, striving for cool and casual. (Erica insisted he could pull it off; Cora always insisted he had two modes: serial killer or douchey flirt. There was a reason Derek liked Erica.) “So, Stiles, can I take you to dinner?”

Now Stiles just looked confused. “Like, as a thank you? Seriously, not necessary.”

“No, as a date.”

Derek had never seen someone look so exactly like the definition of flustered. “What? No! Are you serious? No. I mean, you’re my patient, that would be so inappropriate…”

“Stiles,” said a voice from the doorway on the other side of desk, which Derek had barely noticed earlier, but now was extremely aware of thanks to all the herbal scents wafting through it. A red-haired woman stood there, hand on the doorframe. “You should go.”

“Go where?”

“On the date. You should go.” She nodded toward his arms.

They all looked down.

“Is… is your tree blooming?” Derek asked.

Stiles ran his other hand over it, then glanced at the woman. “Lyds?”

She shrugged. “Just a feeling. But maybe you should _look_.”

***

Lydia rarely had visions about Stiles or herself anymore, but long-ingrained habit had him shifting his vision as soon as she said it, for once actually looking at his own energies, at least as much as he could. They seemed to be pulsing more intensely than normal, and everything now looked a bit more… sparkly.

Then Derek moved his hand toward Stiles’ arm, as if to touch the Nemeton tattoo, and Stiles realized his aura was pulsing in time with Derek’s, the colors that had no names cycling through a spectrum together.

“What is even happening?” Stiles whispered.

Derek shrugged. “I don’t know. But my wolf likes you. A lot. I figured it couldn’t hurt to try to get to know you and find out if I share that opinion. I stopped questioning the things happening to me today a few hours ago.”

“I. Um. Yeah, okay. Why does your wolf like me?”

Derek quirked a half-smile. “Says you’re my new anchor.”

Stiles blinked at him.

“You did tell me I needed something better than anger.”

“I’m, like, a thousand percent sure this is not what I meant.”

Derek looked down at the flowering Nemeton again. (Stiles was fairly certain it wasn’t even of a species of tree that _had_ flowers.) “Doesn’t seem like that matters, now does it?”

Stiles reached out and caught Derek’s hand, his magic surging up, invisible sparks showering across Stiles’ sight. “No, it really doesn’t,” Stiles said, and then he leaned across the counter and kissed him.

**Author's Note:**

> Now that the exchange has revealed authors: Yes, I am on [tumblr](https://rhysiana.tumblr.com/)!  
> Also, many thanks to @storiesfromtheden and @poetry-protest-pornography for their quick betaing before I had to run out the door for a family reunion.


End file.
